Speak Up, Silicon Valley : “Speaking up when you see someone else wronged sends a powerful message. It simultaneously demonstrates the wrongheadedness of the action to the perpetrator while showing support to the wronged party.”

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Post navigation

9 thoughts on “Where the Wild Linkspam Are (25th May, 2012)”

The pseudo-science and pseudo-feminism of Women Don’t Ask : A little older than our typical links, but a really thorough analysis of a too oft repeated argument

Ouch, I had no idea that Women Don’t Ask was considered to be presenting a flawed pseudo-science/pseudo-feminist argument — I’ve been recommending it, and I expect that many of the other readers here have too.

Our own wiki still mentions Val’s praise for it and its “solid research grounding”. If we consider its argument to be too oft-repeated, should we stop repeating it?

I’m not sure the linked entry represents a concensus view yet as you seem to be assuming (partly because of the work the author has put into it: further interesting debate on it now requires familiarity with the literature, rather than geek feminist armchairing).

It’s certainly a serious enough (both in terms of the effort put in and the strength of the criticism) feminist criticism that it should be prominently linked from the wiki page though.

Studies BEFORE and since have indicated that, which is part of why that book (and its being waved around in women-blaming) is frustrating. They didn’t seem to do a review of the literature available already on the topic, before writing it.

Interesting. In a conflict management class I have used Kolb’s and Williams’ “The shadow negotiation: how women can master the hidden agendas that determine bargaining success”. Most of their motivation is Babcock, but at least the prescriptions it gives are actually useful for all genders in negotiations. The article I ask students to use to get a sense of gendered behaviours is Parghi and Murphy’s (dated, from 1999) literature review “Gender and conflict resolution and negotiation: what the literature tells us” (which has unfortunately disappeared from the Web.)

My summary of that is that the question of whether gender affects conflict resolution and negotiation behavior cannot be clearly answered. The research is also divided on the question of whether men and women behave differently during negotiation and conflict resolution; however there is ample evidence that they do expect each other to behave differently. Also, studies that used self-report rather than field or lab observation were more likely to find gender differences in behavior, and these self-reports may more accurately reflect some forms of behavior in the field. How gender affects behavior may be influenced by the gender composition of the workgroup, and the research conducted in this study also uncovers mixed findings on the question of how, if at all, power and role interact with gender and affect behavior. The only thing that seems clear is that power is a crucial, and not yet fully understood ingredient in the mix of gender and conflict resolution and negotiation styles.

Ultimately, on the question of biology, Parghi and Murphy emphasize that the research shows weak and varied results. Parghi and Murphy conclude the review of their experiment by stating, “in order for the research on gender and conflict resolution and negotiation to be more generalizable, we need studies that use adults as participants rather than college or graduate students. Such samples should include a wide range of respondents from different classes, races, ethnicities, rural/urban backgrounds, etc.” (Parghi and Murphy 15).

However, in our expectations and perceptions of others, we do tend to perceive effectiveness based on gender stereotypes and gender stereotypes affect our own strategy, and our sense of appropriate roles in others, which may include “self fulfilling,” “double-blind” (seen as pushy due to masculine behaviors or emotional because of feminine behaviors) or “hidden negotiation”.

As a new linkspam compiler (and the compiler of this one in particular) I will freely admit that I had no idea the geek feminism wiki recommends that book (I was clearly skimming by the end where she links to the wiki). I didn’t find this article, I pulled it in through the link compiler script (which grabs user tagged links on delicious and pinboard), but I did choose to include it even though it was a little old and I did add the ‘oft repeated’ line.

This article spoke to me in particular because I still randomly remember and am irked by Clay Shirkey’s A Rant About Women, which is basically a ‘women need to speak up for themselves’ rant without seeming to have any understanding at all of the societal constructs and larger issues involved. I didn’t double check any of the research at that link, so I’d say it could still be open to debate. I did find it compelling enough to include.

Ellie, thank you for compiling the link spam! I always enjoy reading them.

I’m with you: I still randomly remember and am irked by Shirky’s rant, too–in no small part because I got into it with a normally enlightened (male) friend, who in this case though Shirky’s advice was GREAT (even though Shirky’s rant largely contradicted the advice my friend gives to men AND women in his own business life, which was the crazy-making part). I put together a lot of information to try to get through to him and utterly failed at the time. (I’m hoping maybe I planted a seed and maybe he’ll have an epiphany down the road once it’s all percolated.)

Anyway, as fellow irk-ee, I’m happy to share some of the research with you that I did then–sadly, it never seems to stop coming in handy.

Here are the links (Note, this is just for you, in this conversation, not a submission for future linkspams; I realize that the site probably doesn’t want to revisit the Shirky mess two years on, especially as it did its own outstanding link roundup at the time, and that most of the posts, while excellent, are dated):

Simple Justice: <a href="
Simple Justice: “>Fear, Loathing and White Boy Justice (didn’t ever get into the link roundups at the time, I found it in a different context long afterwards, but it really explains what went wrong: the difference between reach and grasp)